30 Seconds Quick Play Instructions

Thanks to months of meticulous planning, incredible user feedback and far too much black coffee, The Retrospective Game can be played 100s of different ways. But just for you, the impatient facilitator, here’s how you and your team can start gathering insights in 30 seconds or less…

Conversation Stage

Review the green Topic Cards and choose the topic you’d like to discuss (or pick one at random)

Choose a Topic card, like Sprint or Release. This allows you and your team to deeply explore conversations relating to that Topic.

Pick a red Character Card. Like The Queen, A Unicorn, Donkey or The President

This is the character or persona from which you will review and think about the topic up for discussion.

Silly voices, costumes, drawings, ridiculous puns, and badly formed anecdotes are welcome.

Conversations your team might have:

Facilitator: What does The Queen think of the latest Release?

Team: “One is not amused with the latest release”

“I couldn’t possibly use this, it’s not up to my regal standards”

“Off with its head”

Tip: You don’t need to limit the game to just words. Spice things up by getting your team drawing.

Continuing conversation gameplay

To help supercharge these conversations, encourage creativity or get your quietest team members involved, you can optionally also pick up either a blue Cheer, purple Boo (Improve) or black Random card.

These form sentences with the Topic and Character cards to help shape the conversations either positively, negatively or RANDOMLY. Watch out though, introducing these cards can make things seriously weird and wacky.

Documentation Stage

[a note on documentation: there are many ways you record, prioritise and action the conversations]

Basic documentation stage:

Document your team’s positive and negative feedback and issues

Many facilitators give their team members a pen and post-it note so they can privately record their thoughts

Group similar conversations and feedback, and reflect on their priority

A whiteboard or wall is a great way to visualise the conversations

Create actions to help your team continuously improve

At The Retrospective Game we use Mindful.team to record our team actions

That’s it. The simplest form of TRG done for you.